The personal politics of marriage

America went from abject horror to widespread support of same-sex marriage in record time.

America went from abject horror to widespread support of same-sex marriage in record time.

Polls have support for marriage equality as high as 58 percent and rising fast. It's over 80 percent for Americans between 18 and 29. The parade is moving fast, and there's no doubt where it's going.

I joined it early on. In 1996, after attending a family celebration of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, I wrote that my sister and her partner should be able to get married, too. The political issue started with a personal connection.

The question raised last week is whether nine Supreme Court justices should jump in and lead that parade with a sweeping ruling legalizing same-sex marriage everywhere. I'm not sure they should.

Same-sex marriage supporters often object to "voting on civil rights," as if a ruling by nine judges has more moral legitimacy. But we vote on rights all the time. Here in Massachusetts, we voted last fall to grant the right to medical marijuana, and to deny the right to physician-assisted suicide. We don't just vote on rights, we legislate them and litigate them, all the time.

Fundamental rights might be God-given, but the only way they get enshrined in the Constitution, the law and the tax code is through a political process.

Here in Massachusetts, the state Supreme Court started the process of legalizing same-sex marriage with its landmark ruling in 2003, and for years we heard complaints about the tyranny of unelected judges. But the issue then found its way to the state Legislature, for two up-or-down votes, with an election in-between, to see whether a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage would be put on the ballot.

What made the difference, legislators said at the time, was meeting and talking with their gay constituents about their lives and their families. They made it personal; they put faces on the controversy.

The reason gay rights have come so far, so fast, is that no other oppressed minority has been as deeply embedded in the majority. Gay people were sitting at the family table all along, working at the next desk, sitting in the same pew. They just hadn't told friends and family about it.

In 1986, the Supreme Court was considering the constitutionality of state laws that made sodomy a crime. In a story told by author Jeffrey Toobin, Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote in the case, was discussing homosexuality with one of his law clerks. "I don't believe I've ever met a homosexual," Powell said.

The law clerk, a closeted gay man, told Powell he believed he had, but the conversation got no more personal than that, and Powell joined the majority in Bowers v. Hardwick, upholding a law that made it a crime for gay couples to make love.

I doubt any Supreme Court justice today would think he'd never met a homosexual, and that makes all the difference.

A few months after the first gay weddings in Massachusetts, voters in Ohio and 10 other states adopted amendments to their constitutions banning same-sex marriage. But you can't stop sweeping social change with a single vote, or a single court ruling.

This month, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio became the first Republican senator to endorse gay marriage. He changed his mind, he said, after his son, Will, told his parents he's gay. Portman has taken some heat from the left for waiting until discrimination hit his own family before finding empathy for its victims. But it took courage for both the son and the father to take their family business public, and political leaders who have "evolved" on this issue should be thanked, not criticized. Remember, just a year ago, President Barack Obama still opposed same-sex marriage.

Portman isn't the only Ohioan who has changed his mind. A poll this week found 54 percent of Ohio voters support a new constitutional amendment repealing the 2004 ban, with just 40 percent opposed. It will take some effort - gathering signatures on petitions, lobbying elected officials and having discussions among families, friends and neighbors that will get very personal - but I have no doubt marriage equality will come to Ohio and, eventually all the other states.

If the Supreme Court does the right thing, overturning the Defense of Marriage Act and ruling same-sex marriage to be a constitutional right in all 50 states, people in Ohio and other states won't have to go through that political process. They won't have to have those personal discussions. They can blame it all on the unelected judges, as if it wasn't their decision at all.

But something will have been lost. Lasting social change isn't imposed from the top; it bubbles up from the bottom. In its purest form, politics is about changing minds, and the minds we value most are those of our relatives, friends and neighbors.

Gay and lesbian Americans don't just want to win an election or a court case. They want the community to recognize their families and respect their commitments. That is happening, inexorably, because they have made marriage equality more than a political wedge issue, more than a matter of constitutional interpretation. They have made it personal.

Rick Holmes, opinion editor for the MetroWest (Mass.) Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. He can be reached at rholmes@wickedlocal.com.